How American is Germany?

Or: When ALF crash-landed in my life

Central Berlin, 2019. Img: MatteoBroc, CC BY-SA 4.0.

“Anne Schedeen has died,” I read in a German newspaper this week. My first thought was “who?” but when I read on, I became surprisingly saddened by the death of a woman I’d never met: “The actress best known for playing the Mom on ‘ALF’ died at 77.” Like many German children growing up in the 1990s, I absolutely loved the American sitcom ALF in which Schedeen had played a major role as Kate Tanner, the matriarch of the family that adopted the titular and hilariously outrageous “Alien Life Form”.

Kate Tanner was never the show's main attraction. ALF was – a furry alien with a taste for cats whose real name was Gordon Shumway and who crash-landed in the Tanners’ garage. But Kate and the rest of the Tanner family formed an endearing framework for the story. It was a strangely comforting, if of course entirely fictional, glimpse into American middle-class suburbia.

The images that flickered through the tube TV in our pre-fab flat in small-town eastern Germany were strange and fascinating. Much like ALF, I appeared to land in the Tanners’ house from a different planet.